Stringfellow to participate in Let Them Eat LACMA

07 Nov Stringfellow to participate in Let Them Eat LACMA

Kim will participate in Let them Eat LACMA—a one-day event where dozens of artists and collectives will activate, intervene, and re-imagine the entire museum’s campus and galleries. Peppered with interactive talks, performances, and events, Let them Eat LACMA will expand our perception of art, food, and the museum.

FIFTY ARTISTS EXPLORE FOOD, ART, CULTURE AND POLITICS

Sing for your supper, come bellyache with us and slake your thirst at Let Them Eat LACMA! For the last “course” of EATLACMA, a year-long investigation of food, art, culture and politics, we’ve assembled over fifty artists and collaborations all focused in different ways on food.

High tea and gluttony, belly listening, parasites, Spam, and the world seen from the potato’s perspective! David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young of Fallen Fruit invite artists and the public to reconsider the museum and the very first form of civilization: food, and to examine the most primordial thing that connects us to each other: what, how, and why we eat. Share a bite and nibble and munch your way through a wild menu of installations, performances and interventions throughout the entire museum campus.

See chewing carolers, a tomato fight, and a year’s worth of plates assembled into a mandala that disappears into the crowd! Join us for a watermelon eating contest, hear about the mystery of the knife, fork and spoon, watch Salome seduce her lover through the language of food, sample the food served to prisoners in California jails, and finally, EAT THE MUSEUM itself!

The Owens Valley Water Project illuminates the controversial history and physical sources of municipal drinking water for the city of Los Angeles.

Project Synopsis:

For Let Them Eat LACMA, artist Kim Stringfellow exhibited a series of wall-mounted digital slide shows illuminating the controversial history and physical sources of municipal drinking water for the city of Los Angeles. The digital photo frames were mounted directly above drinking fountains found throughout the LACMA campus for the November 7th, 2010 event. Each digital photo frame displayed a multimedia presentation with text, photos, and audio addressing the contentious and colorful history of the Los Angeles Aqueduct system.

The Owens Valley watershed is a complex system of over forty creeks and streams that drain from the Eastern Sierra Nevada mountain range into the Owens River. During the past century, the Owens River has been radically transformed and engineered into a larger water transportation and power system known as the Los Angeles Aqueduct. The transformation of the Owens Valley watershed is part of a famously contentious history made up of both myth and fact representing one of the most well-known water/land grabs in U.S. history. The dynamic growth over the last century and the physical landscape of Los Angeles undeniably resulted and are intrinsically linked to the construction and service of the aqueduct. The aqueduct remains a controversial topic for Owens Valley residents to this day due to the fact that its manager, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), remains the largest private landholder in the valley.

The goal of the project is to connect its audience visually to a selection of distant physical locations providing water for the city of Los Angeles. The project also seeks to provide educational and historical information about the Los Angeles aqueduct system as well as water conservation issues.

ABOUT

Kim Stringfellow is an artist, educator, writer and curator based in Joshua Tree, CA. Her work bridges cultural geography, public practice and experimental documentary into creative, socially engaged transmedia experiences. She is a 2016 Andy Warhol for the Visual Arts Curatorial Fellow and a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow in Photography. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from Claremont University in 2018. Stringfellow is a Professor at San Diego State University’s School of Art + Design.